Read It In The Paper

I hope this is a link to a story I read in the paper this morning. Well, not a story, but an opinion. I have trouble making the links work. If not, the address is:
http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=762639

It seems like I read something similar in the paper every day. Sometimes it's about education, sometimes crime and gangs, sometimes abortion or teen pregnancy, any which way, I think the point is being missed.

In this particular column there are a few issues. The first issue is the mis-labeling of kids. Yes, disabled ought to mean some sort of actual disability and not "just" behavior issues, attendance issues or failing grades. It ought to. I don't know that with kids arriving at school in the state they're in, it's possible to rule all these other things out as a disability, at the very least, it's a true disadvantage.

Ms. Larson continues on in her column to state what most people believe. A school ought not to be asked to do the parents job of teaching manners, obedience, self-control, etc. Well, she's ultimately right. It should be the parents job. Parents are not doing their jobs. There are exceptions, as she stated by telling us of her nephew's outstanding performance in school, I'd guess partially due to having parents--notice the plural--that were doing their parenting jobs.

It's true. Most parents in aren't doing the job that parents two or three generations back were doing. Most families don't even look like they did a few cycles back. The family with a traditional, old fashioned marriage is an oddity. A current family may be a 20-something single woman with multiple kids from different fathers. The children may or may not know their fathers. The parents may or may not be working. The parents may or may not be high school graduates. Their grandparents might be in their 30's or 40's. Their grandparents might be married, they might have different children from all different sorts of situations, they might work, they might be high school graduates; but the reality is, they might not be.

So when you're a kid, all cocky and scared, living in a city that is by any means dangerous by day and deadly by night, and you're not seeing a future, what do you do? When you look back in your family and see that no one you know is married or ever stayed married, what does that do? What about looking into your family and seeing no one whose stuck it through and graduated, no one that's ever held a job or kept a job longer than a few months? What's it like to live in a life where getting arrested is normal? What's it like to live when things like juvie jail and foster care are normal?

Don't we think that any of that comes into play when we chatter on about what a school should do or not do for these kids? Yes, a school can't do everything, nor should it be expected to, but for an awful lot of these kids, their families are failing them, so it is up to the schools. We seem to keep forgetting that all these hard kids with the bad behavior come from places where there are no role models, there isn't a lot of good attention, there isn't much self-esteem, there is no reward for working hard and doing the right thing. Staying in school and doing the right thing makes you some sort of crazy or weak.

We seem to forget that these kids are going to grow up to be adults. They'll either get some help from the schools now, and grow up to be adults maybe with diplomas, jobs, better manners, some self control and maybe better parents than their own parents were to them, or they'll follow the cycle. They'll stay in their place. They'll become those adults we shake our heads at and say, why can't they pull it together, get their GED's, get a drivers license, get a job. Why can't they be better parents to their kids? Why?